Werewolf: How a parlour game became a tech phenomenon

This article was taken from the March issue of Wired UK
magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before
they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional
content bysubscribing online

O'Reilly Media is the biggest name in tech publishing, and the
men gathered round its boardroom table this July morning in 2008
are typical of the mavens who frequent its Sebastopol, California,
HQ. Here is Brian Fitzpatrick, head of engineering at Google
Chicago; Rich Gibson, an O'Reilly author and member of the GigaPan
panoramic camera project; and Jimmy Wales, the founder of
Wikipedia. Just another networking day in Silicon Valley, then.

Except the workday doesn't begin for hours -- it's 6am, and no
one has slept. Fitzpatrick Segwayed into the room three hours ago,
and hasn't left. Tempers have frayed, and language has descended
into the gutter. Wales is making wild accusations. Fitzpatrick is
begging and pleading. Gibson, overwhelmed by the pressure, lets out
a scream and starts pelting the others with pretzels. No one is
drunk or under any narcotic influence, and yet all three men are
moments away from what Fitzpatrick will later describe as "a
mindfuck". A year on, Gibson concurs. "It left me with the sense
that one of my basic anchors on reality had been ripped loose," he
recalls. Wales still talks about the all-nighter with reverent
awe:"It was amazing. It was a work of art. It was a thing of
beauty."

It was, more specifically, a parlour game.

Werewolf is a game of deception and manipulation. It
has infected almost every significant tech event around the world,
from the informal Foo Camp conferences run by O'Reilly to the
music, film and interactive-media crossover of South By Southwest
(SXSW). During lunch at San Francisco's giant Game Developers
Conference, or in the bars after closing at ETech, games of
Werewolf break out spontaneously. Its core premise is simple -- a
room is split between villagers and werewolves, and the former
aren't aware who are their enemies, determined to eat them. Can the
werewolves eat their prey before the villagers identify and lynch
the werewolves?

In practice -- perhaps unsurprisingly, given the kind of people
playing -- the games played at tech events are rarely that simple.
Groups splinter off according to arcane variations -- someone wants
to play with the Slut and the Invalid, someone else with the
Vigilante and the Veterinarian, someone else with all four. Rules
agreed, the splinter groups reform, spectators gather, and the
games begin. And it may be hours before they stop. Although in
principle a round of Werewolf can take as little as 30 minutes,
epic rounds last for hours - and one round is rarely enough. The
next morning, appropriately, you can spot the werewolves by the red
rings round their eyes.

Wales, Fitzpatrick, Gibson and their moderator were the last
players standing after an all-night Werewolf session that had lured
in almost a third of 2008's Foo Camp. Three players remaining meant
only one thing: two villagers, one werewolf. It meant the players
who knew they were villagers faced a simple challenge: which of the
others was the enemy? And yet the argument had raged for hours. "I
was sure of only three things," Wales remembers. "One, I was not a
werewolf. Two, one of these bastards was an amazing liar. And
three, the other guy was a total moron. I just couldn't figure out
which was which."

Werewolf is quick and easy to set up, and the basic rules take
no more than a minute to explain. It has infected every outpost of
the tech community. More than any smart party, it's the most
exclusive and productive way to spend an evening at a conference or
expo. It's your best bet of finding the most interesting people and
of emerging the next morning with a couple of intriguing job
offers. Rather than spend a fortune on funky business cards or
hours memorising people's blog posts, the most effective way to
connect in the tech industry may instead be to kill and eat
them.

You might expect to find Werewolf's roots in a 70s tabletop
role-playing game or an old, obscure multi-user dungeon. What you
find instead is a tale of literary privilege, Soviet idealism and
secret nuclear disasters. It draws on parlour games such as Murder
in the Dark and Wink Murder -- games that, though entertaining
enough, no longer captivate a modern audience. To turn dinner-party
murder into a geek staple would take the work of two men-- one
Russian, one American -- who decades later have yet to meet.

In 1987, the USSR was starting to change. Mikhail Gorbachev was
introducing the perestroika reforms which would ultimately lead to
the end of the Cold War. The first treaty between the USSR and the
US limiting the proliferation of nuclear weapons was signed. Billy
Joel played Leningrad and over-excited fans danced so hard they
broke 200 seats. And at Moscow State University a young psychology
student, Dimitry Davidoff, was trying to cram two years of college
into one while teaching high-school students interested in his
subject. It was a timetable that demanded total efficiency, so
Davidoff needed to find a way to make the research that he was
doing for his term papers palatable to a young audience. The result
wasn't (yet) Werewolf; it was a game called Mafia.

Mafia is the game that forms the core element of Werewolf.
Davidoff explains it succinctly as "the uninformed majority versus
the informed minority". The basic structure of day phases and night
phases, killings and lynchings, is the same but with one main
difference. Instead of the killers being given a window of
opportunity to co-ordinate their killing -- at night, when their
eyes are open and those of the innocent closed -- they need
surreptitiously to agree a victim during the opening phase of
discussion, when all players are engaged in debate. During the
night phase, players then write down the name of a proposed victim.
Innocent players write "Innocent"; Mafia members write down the
name of a victim. Only when all the Mafiosi agree on a name do they
make a successful kill.

It's a game that is almost entirely about careful wording and
hidden subtexts. Wired learns to remember this when
attempting to interview its creator. Davidoff -- intelligent and
cheery -- delights, perhaps unsurprisingly, in playing
conversational games. His first gambit is to refuse to talk to us
at all, eschewing phone, email or even instant messaging.

So our first interview takes place inside the virtual sphere of
World of Warcraft, where Davidoff's dwarf hunter character
comes to escort our feeble level-one mage through the start of the
game. He's friendly, but it gradually becomes apparent that the
lulls and disconnects in the conversation are not caused purely by
unruly mob attacks. The simplest question ("Have you always liked
games?") is met with a dodge ("Should I answer that?"), before he
relents and parts with an affirmative. Efforts to elucidate his
current life -- beyond the fact that he moved to the US in 1991 and
lives in Boston -- are met with disapproval. "Ah, those standard
follow-up questions. I hope you skip them in print." Apologies for
being so inevitable are met with a sharp retort. "Not really," he
shoots back. "There is nothing inevitable. Big point!" The silence
that follows drags on for a full minute. "Look at it this way," he
suggests, "now you are kind of playing Mafia against me."

And so it goes on. Ask about Davidoff's childhood, and the only
detail he parts with readily is his Rubik's Cube record (around 21
seconds). Even his age requires some prising: ask him how old he is
and he says, "In World of Warcraft I would say, 'I am level 11,'
and be done with that, but all these real-life connotations make it
a strange question." Then he quickly adds -- still without
answering the question -- "It's not that I am hiding my age." When
pressed for the real number, he still can't resist a jibe. "Well,
the real number I'd have to think of, but I know the year of my
birth -- 1967. Knowing's not good, though, 'cause it doesn't help
you to solve who is Mafia." Even the most general questions --"What
were your happiest times as a child?" -- result in a cryptic
sidestep: "Nah, I can't answer that. I know too much about memory,
happiness and children."

It seems simpler, then, to seek a sense of Davidoff 's life
through the emblematic moments of recent Soviet history which
bookend it. He was born in Kamensk-Uralsky, an unremarkable,
mid-sized town towards the centre of the current border with
Kazakhstan. It's a spot less than 150km from the site of the 1957
Kyshtym nuclear disaster -- a blast second only in size to that at
Chernobyl -- which killed hundreds and was hushed up by Soviet
officials until 1989. The Chernobyl explosion occurred in 1986,
while Davidoff was starting the work which would produce Mafia, and
Gorbachev was busy trying to block the US Star Wars space weapons
programme. And in 1991, just months after the fall of the Iron
Curtain, Davidoff made the move to the US -- a country he now
calls, with tongue deep in cheek, "the perfect Soviet Union".

Mafia first spread among the children and students whom Davidoff
taught to play, but once out in the wild it propagated fast -- far
beyond Russia's still-closed borders and across the world. Russian
students who had gone abroad for postgraduate work took it with
them, embedding it into the clubs and groups they joined. A set of
Hungarian Mensa members so loved the game that they set up a
special interest group to teach it to other Mensans around the
world. Questors, a west London community theatre, integrated Mafia
into its improvisation practices in the late 80s; by 1989, it had
reached the US, where the children at a Pennsylvania summer camp
taught each other the rules by torchlight.

Having infected the student population, Mafia travelled where
they travelled. Fred Deakin, one half of the band Lemon Jelly and
now head of the Airside design agency, recalls teaching dozens of
other travellers as he backpacked around south-east Asia in the
late 80s. "I was the most popular guy in Thailand just because, at
every hostel I went into, I sat down after a couple of beers and
said, 'Does anyone want to play this game?' And people would flock
like moths around a flame. It was incredible." Once Mafia reached
the Far East, it found the perfect breeding ground in China's
late-night clubs. Zachary Mexico, in his book China
Underground, details how Mafia addicts now play all night,
fuelled by Red Bull and cigarettes. These aren't amiable
afterdinner diversions, but commercialised Mafia dens, with
electronic scoreboards, pretty young hostesses and techno music
blaring out to cover up any movements during the "night" phase of
the game.

Nick Meek

So why did Mafia spread so fast? Arguably because it answers one
of life's most fundamental questions. At its heart, perhaps
inevitably for a game created by a psychology student who came of
age under a regime that hushed up a massive nuclear disaster for
more than 30 years, is the question of whether knowledge is power.
The only advantage the killers have is knowledge: they know each
others' identities. With that, they split the world into the
empowered minority and the vulnerable majority. Balancing that
dynamic is another strength: Mafia's resonance with some of the
worst, but most universal, traits of human society. Every culture
has had its witch-hunts and pogroms, and anxiety about being caught
on the wrong side of persecution is a fear that crosses borders,
languages and eras. Mafia, in its abstract, trivial way, lets us
play with those fears. That could have been the end of the story.
But in 1997, things changed, when Mafia arrived in New Jersey,
where one Martin Eiger was running gaming parties. A friend came
along and taught the crowd Mafia. It was a hit, so when Eiger
attended the National Puzzlers' League convention later that year,
he decided to teach a group of players. It proved just as big a
hit; games ran late into the night.

Among the group that night was Andrew Plotkin, a legend among
interactive-fiction writers. He still remembers his less-than
stellar debut: "I cheerfully announced that I was Mafia, because I
didn't know what I was trying to do. I think that ended poorly."
Defeat didn't matter: he was hooked. "I was fascinated with the
game design. I had never seen a game with such a pure strategic
underpinning -- no mechanics to be strategic about. It was what
poker would be if you didn't play with a deck of cards, but bet
solely on other people's bets. It shouldn't have worked, but it
did." He made his first contribution to changing Mafia forever: he
introduced it to a new gizmo he was very enthusiastic about: the
World Wide Web.

What catapulted Mafia's popularity was Plotkin's second
contribution: werewolves. "I thought the rules were brilliant, but
the theme felt arbitrary. Mafia aren't that big a cultural
reference. I wanted to find a theme that fit hidden enemies who
look normal during the day, but are murderous at night. Werewolves
were the obvious choice."

If you want to play Werewolf well, you have to draw on a wide
skill-set. First comes memory. It's not always easy -- particularly
at 2am -- to remember who accused whom and how everyone voted, but
this is crucial for spotting patterns. And you need meticulous
observational skills; note someone drumming their fingers or
fiddling with their collar, and you have the "evidence" to back up
whatever theory you're selling. Then there are concrete
observational cues -- who's making eye contact with whom? Has
somebody slipped up by saying a werewolf has been lynched, when
only a fellow werewolf could know that?

Statistics also play a part. Werewolf is ripe for
back-of-the-envelope calculations about the odds, say, of someone
correctly identifying werewolves in consecutive rounds without
being a werewolf himself. But as the game goes on and the pool of
players shrinks, it becomes a very different proposition. At this
point an acute memory, an eye for detail and a knack for numbers
are only a foundation.

End-game Werewolf is about flair and imagination; oratory; force
of personality; performance. For self-confessed geeks, this is
often quite a leap; these interpersonal skills are not necessarily
those most visible at the kind of events where Werewolf flourishes.
But it's not a paradox for Frank Lantz, Werewolf fan and half the
team behind New York games company Area/Code. "I am shocked,
shocked!, by your implication that technically minded people might,
on average, be lacking in the social-skills department," he says.
"But assuming for a second that we are, it makes perfect sense that
we'd enjoy a game like this. It sanctions a lot of titillating
social behaviour -- flirtation, confrontation, betrayal. Even the
way it condones bold eye contact and the frank scrutiny of others'
behaviour is hot, specially if you don't get a lot of those things
in your regular social diet."

It's this, then, that may explain the particular appeal of
Werewolf to the tech crowd. This mix of hard computational skills
and a real test of interpersonal aptitude offers the ultimate
full-spectrum battlefield. Strength in one field can make up for
weaknesses in others, but a masterful player needs both. And that's
another paradox: if you impress your peers (and in a conference
environment that probably means potential clients and employers)
with your aptitude for the game, you're also impressing them with
your aptitude for lying, for leading witch-hunts, for distrusting
your friends.

But this doesn't mean that the best liar is the best player.
Simon Moore, a psychologist at London Metropolitan University who
specialises in gaming, is quick to quash the idea that some people
are better at spotting liars than others. "If you ask someone on
the street, are they better at detecting a liar than a police
officer, they'll probably say no. But a police officer and a
'general' person both have a 50 per cent success rate." And how
well we lie depends on circumstance: "When you've more to lose,
you're more stressed about lying, and that makes it easier to
detect." Werewolf is a game which asks you to tell lies in some of
the hardest circumstances. Falsehoods -- such as proclaiming you're
a villager when you're a werewolf -- take a much greater toll than
lies of exaggeration, which are notoriously hard to detect.

"A lie, as opposed to an exaggeration, will cause a greater
physiological response -- so your heart-rate, your blood pressure,
your breathing will all increase more if you're lying than just
exaggerating," says Moore. The other great challenge is sustaining
what he calls "emotional" lies. "If you're trying to feign shock or
anger, it's much harder to do over a long period. People accused of
something they're trying to hide will start out feigning outrage --
'How dare you ask me that?' But that will start to change to
objection rather than shock, as it's psychologically very difficult
to mimic emotion. So emotion turns into aggression, as that is one
of the easiest things to fake."

The other key circumstantial difference -- and how Davidoff
would enjoy this -- is knowledge. We're all equally bad at spotting
lies by strangers, all better at spotting lies by people we know.
The more you play, especially with the same people, the better you
get at spotting their lies. You may think this is a flaw, but
Davidoff is way ahead of you -- it's part of the plan. Good players
learn to lie well, but also to get better at spotting others' lies.
At this level the game stops being about memory or strategy, and
gets deeper: how you play and the choices you make aren't
reflective of the rules, but of your own preoccupations. For
Davidoff, this is why (contrary to what most players think) his
game isn't about lying. Odds are you'll play a villager much more
often than a killer. And he swears that as a villager, your best
strategy is to be honest. More confusingly, he swears that this is
also the best strategy for those playing werewolves/ Mafia. Asked
to elaborate, he responds with classic obliqueness:" Past
connections will always lose to future collaborations."

So can he tell if people will be good at Werewolf or Mafia? "No
one can. Mafia could be a test for a bunch of psychological
theories, because there are almost none which could help you win.
It's about freedom; it's hard to predict who will win. So people
don't have the advantages of the past: education, knowledge, rules,
experience."

It's a lofty sentiment, although when you walk into a roomful of
people playing, it rarely looks as if something lofty is going on.
In the O'Reilly board room that fateful morning, what you'd have
seen was three senior tech leaders throwing crisps at each other,
all outraged at being accused. It was either a virtuoso display of
the hardest kind of lying -- extended, emotional falsehood -- or
something more peculiar.

Something peculiar was happening. What the players
didn't know was that they'd stopped playing the game, and it had
started playing them. Their moderator was games designer Jane
McGonigal, and she had stripped the last of the fiction from the
game: "We'd exhausted all the modifications," she says. So she
dealt a pack that contained only villager cards.

As the game progressed, Fitzpatrick was oblivious. "It seemed it
was going pretty well -- like any game when you're a villager. I
was convinced Jimmy [Wales] was the werewolf as he was quieter than
Rich [Gibson], so I was saying, 'It's Jimmy, I really think we can
win this.'" Wales was equally oblivious: "I had absolutely no clue
something funny was happening." Gibson was feeling the pressure of
the casting vote: "I felt this sense of 'Schrödinger's werewolf',
looking first at one and then the other, back and forth. Then I
started throwing things. I don't know what I was thinking. It was
awesome!"

In the end, the axe fell on Fitzpatrick, and he erupted. "I was
so bummed out! I threw my card down and said, 'I'm a fucking
villager,' and Rick said, 'What do you mean? I'm a
villager.' So I say, 'I told you it was Jimmy,' and we turn to
Jimmy and he's just looking at us, and he says, 'What the fuck? I'm
a villager!' And then we looked over at Jane who's sitting there
with this big grin on her face, and I'm like... there are no words
to describe it. It was a mindfuck. I was completely screwed in the
head."

So Werewolf has come full circle. What started life as a
psychology experiment has once again become a psychology
experiment; an exercise in role-play which has more in common with
the Stanford prison experiment than Dungeons & Dragons. What
Werewolf has to offer is a perfect marriage of statistics and
psychology, of mob rule and democracy, reason and emotion. Is it
any wonder it's taking over the world?

Nick Meek

How to play

Assemble a group of seven or more players, and choose a
moderator. The moderator deals cards which designate each player as
either a villager or a werewolf. Players do not reveal their cards
until the game is over. For groups of seven up, you will need two
werewolves; more than 12, three.

The game plays out over a period of "night" and "day" phases,
controlled by the moderator. During the "night", all players shut
their eyes. The moderator calls on any werewolves present to open
their eyes and, using gestures and hand signals, they silently
nominate a victim. When "night" ends, all players open their eyes
and the moderator announces who has died. This player leaves the
game and must not make any further comments, and especially not
reveal whether he was a villager or a werewolf.

During the "day", which lasts around 15 minutes, there is
nothing to distinguish werewolves from villagers, so players debate
between themselves and agree on a person to lynch, in the hope of
killing a werewolf. This player then leaves the game and must not
make any further comments. The cycle is repeated until either all
the werewolves are dead (a villager victory), or the werewolves are
equal in number to the remaining villagers (a werewolf victory).
The moderator announces the result, and players are then free to
reveal their cards.

The creator of Mafia is intensely private -- he agreed to meet
Wired only within World of Warcraft. He grew up in an austere
Russian town but now lives in Boston with his family and dog. (He
describes himself as "self-played" rather than "self-employed" but
has never made serious money from Mafia.) Davidoff invented the
game as a teaching tool in 1987 while a psychology undergraduate in
Moscow; it has since spread across the world. Hasbro considered
commercialising it when Davidoff arrived in the US, but thought it
"unprotectable". Mafia is now used to treat gambling addicts in
China and troubled US teens in Christian summer camps. Davidoff is
blasé about such evolutions of his brainchild: "I'm against taking
it seriously all the time."

Andrew Plotkin

Better known by the nom de plume Zarf, Plotkin is considered a
hero in the field of interactive fiction (IF). His many influential
games include Freefall (a 1995 Tetris clone) and the Carnegie
Mellon KGB's Capture the Flag with Stuff. He describes himself
thus: "Plotkin cannot dance, paint with oils, write novels, fly,
compose music, have a birthday party on the Moon, or make a living
writing computer games." As the man responsible for reinventing
Mafia as Werewolf in 1997, he also introduced the game to the
nascent internet. He readily acknowledges the game's darker side.
"You have to come up with lies very quickly, of course. I'm an IF
designer. I'm used to coming up with lies at leisure, sitting at a
keyboard."

Davidoff and Plotkin's interviews were conducted and written
by Christina Madden

Murder... and parlour games

Playing a hidden killer in a civilised setting first came to
prominence in the 20s, thanks to the Algonquin Round Table. These
journalists, actors and wits, led by Dorothy Parker, would gather
at writer Alexander Woollcott's grand house to play Murder in the
Dark, a game of lights-out where the murderer slips a note into his
victim's pocket to inform them of their demise.

This form of ultra-civilised bloodsport dropped out of the
spotlight during the middle of the century, but was revived by
Stephen Sondheim. His legendary murder parties culminated in his
1973 movie The Last Of Sheila, a dark comedy about a group
of characters, James Mason and RaquelWelch among them (and trapped,
inevitably, on a luxury yacht), who engage in a parlour game that
turns truly murderous.

Those without a yacht, country manor or cadre of film-star
friends may have found themselves playing the rather less elaborate
Wink Murder.

This article was taken from the March issue of Wired UK
magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before
they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional
content bysubscribing online

Edited by Mark Brown

Comments

Great article -- thanks for talking to me.

One correction, though. In that first game I played, when I announced flat-out that I was Mafia -- I was lying! (And nobody believed me.) Like I said, I didn't understand what I was doing.

Andrew Plotkin

Feb 14th 2010

Can I get a source on its original transfer to the US through a Pennsylvania Summer Camp? I'm particularly curious as to which camp.

Tim M

Feb 14th 2010

This doesn't make any sense.

"The basic structure of day phases and night phases, killings and lynchings, is the same but with one main difference. Instead of the killers being given a window of opportunity to co-ordinate their killing -- at night, when their eyes are open and those of the innocent closed -- they need surreptitiously to agree a victim during the opening phase of discussion, when all players are engaged in debate. During the night phase, players then write down the name of a proposed victim. Innocent players write "Innocent"; Mafia members write down the name of a victim. Only when all the Mafiosi agree on a name do they make a successful kill."

Shouldn't that read, "Innocent players write 'Innocent'; WEREWOLVES write down the name of a victim. Only when all the WEREWOLVES agree on a name do they make a successful kill."

Otherwise that says: Mafia is the same as Mafia except that in Mafia the rules are different. Or I suppose in Werewolf the bad guys could be called Mafiosi.

Either way it doesn't make sense because in the instructions that follow there is no mention of this difference.

"Assemble a group of seven or more players, and choose a moderator. The moderator deals cards which designate each player as either a villager or a werewolf. Players do not reveal their cards until the game is over. For groups of seven up, you will need two werewolves; more than 12, three.

The game plays out over a period of "night" and "day" phases, controlled by the moderator. During the "night", all players shut their eyes. The moderator calls on any werewolves present to open their eyes and, using gestures and hand signals, they silently nominate a victim. When "night" ends, all players open their eyes and the moderator announces who has died. This player leaves the game and must not make any further comments, and especially not reveal whether he was a villager or a werewolf.

During the "day", which lasts around 15 minutes, there is nothing to distinguish werewolves from villagers, so players debate between themselves and agree on a person to lynch, in the hope of killing a werewolf. This player then leaves the game and must not make any further comments. The cycle is repeated until either all the werewolves are dead (a villager victory), or the werewolves are equal in number to the remaining villagers (a werewolf victory). The moderator announces the result, and players are then free to reveal their cards."

Those are the rules to Mafia but with different titles.

Am I missing something?

Taylor Seim

Feb 15th 2010

I AM VERY, VERY, VERY IMPRESSED WITH HOW "IN" WITH THE TECH COMMUNITY YOU ARE! THANK YOU FOR SHARING YOUR ULTRA-COOL EXPERIENCES WITH THE LIKES OF US MERE MORTALS. NOW, FOR A 5,000 WORD DIATRIBE ABOUT A DRINKING GAME I PLAYED ONCE....

ADAM

Feb 16th 2010

Taylor: It makes perfect sense to me. If you add these [bracketed] words to the start of the section you quote it may help: "Instead of [Werewolf's structure involving] the killers being given a window of opportunity to co-ordinate their killing-- at night, when their eyes are open and those of the innocent closed -- [in Mafia] they need surreptitiously to agree a victim during the opening phase of discussion..."

So, while I've played Werewolf but not Mafia, my understanding from this article is that there is no collaboration of Mafiosi during the night phase - they must hint to each other during the day so they can write the same name down during the night. In Werewolf the baddies can wake up at night and silently debate who their victim will be.

Mafia's victim-choosing mechanic is therefore quite different, and I'm intrigued enough to try it at a future games night.

Jeremy P

Feb 21st 2010

The author should have played the game. This is a convoluted mess of contradictory rules.

DNT

Feb 22nd 2010

I don't understand. In the Wales/Fitzpatrick/Gibson game, if they were all villagers, how come they didn't notice that nobody was getting killed during the night?

Doug

Feb 23rd 2010

Looks like another game is taking Werewolf to the next level...

http://www.repeatgames.com/TAVERN

Toj

Mar 2nd 2010

I have played numerous versions of Werewolf (I own five different commercial versions) and the best version of Werewolf out there is called Wolf's Creek Tavern. Instead of cards that can be bent or damaged, it uses bar tokens (get it, Wolf's Creek Tavern?) to hand out the player's assignments.

My favorite feature of Wolf's Creek Tavern, over other commercial and free versions, is that all players get to play for the entire game, even after they are killed. As someone who was the first vicitim of the Werewolves in five straight games, I was happy to be able to keep playing rather than having to leave the game in the first two minutes each time - five times in a row.

The poster Toj is right, it is the next level of Werewolf. Get the best version I have ever played at www.repeatgames.com

DexSDW

Mar 2nd 2010

@Doug: In some variations of the game, the Mafia (or Werewolves) are permitted to choose not to kill. Likewise, the Town (or Villagers) can be permitted to vote "No Lynch". I can't speak to this particular game, but it's feasible.

Sabin

Jun 24th 2010

I played Werewolf once at a gaming convention. It was absorbing enough, but as the time approached when I was scheduled to be in another game, I droppped out of Werewolf to keep my other obligation. Even while playing I grew antsy with the situation. Seems to me that villagers havee better strategies available than to randomly lynch someone during the day--like staying up at night and watching to see who changes. Oh well. Maybe I'm not typical. I didn't buy the premise and I'm not that interestedin the game, although I did notice that most of the other players in my game were totally caught up in it

Ken St. Andre

Jun 29th 2010

While not specifically stated, my understanding of the game with no Werewolves was that the moderator was deciding who died each night, since they are the one who would tell everyone the outcome each morning anyway. The only difference was taht she chose, not the werewolves.

One thing not mentioned here was that at our games everyone makes noise during the 'night' so that people moving (looking up, gesturing, etc) doesn't give them away to someone with good hearing.